We are called, as always, to “build a new world in the shell of the old”. The price and fetish of novelty, in ideas as in technical systems, is a blind ahistoricism and wasteful obsolescence that may have gotten us into “this mess” in the first place. Can we come instead in the name of repair and maintenance, and not to make or originate? There is much work to be done, dear readers. Let us begin, again.

Design and maintenance, as categories, are related through their presumed contrasting temporalities. What do we learn about these purifications as they play out over the course of a technological object’s lifetime? Drawing on fieldwork examining the operations of a longstanding spacecraft, Cohn exposes definitions of repair and design through their temporal and affective alignment.

The status of “the object” in the digital age is elusive and ambiguous, ambivalent and indistinct. How do categories like “the app”, and their operating systems, enact and refigure longstanding industrial questions around obsolescence (planned and otherwise)?  Jason Farman and multiple generations of iPhones reflect this, and other questions, as object lessons of care and attention.

The abrupt removal or failure of infrastructures interrupts organisational functions worn smooth by habituation and reliance. How do organizations cope and new practices emerge in the aftermath of shuttered programs? Thinking through the wake of an ambitious telehealth system, Brittany Fiore-Garland explores the problems and possibilities of residue.

In an excerpt from Louis Henderson’s 2013 film “Lettres du Voyant (Visionary Letters)”, we visit three sites that speak directly to maintenance and repair (and lack thereof), and are reminded that we need to be invested in the maintenance and repair of our relations with the world.

How did we imagine the “Year 2000”? What visions of interruption, failure and breakdown shaped our experiences of repair leading up to the new millennium? Artist Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter’s “Bugs in the War Room” explores the mythologies of breakdown, dependencies and contingencies in the lead up to Y2K.

What precisely is assembled when people and things are brought together through repair? What if we approached repair as a fundamentally spatial act, caught up in the workings and reworkings of places through time? Drawing on varied sites and circumstances, Josh Lepawsky, Max Liboiron, Arn Keeling, and Charlie Mather explore the underexamined links between the politics of repair and the politics of space.

What does it mean to live with new and challenging forms of hybrid matter?  What happens when plastics become part of nature (and vice versa)?  And what would a ragpicker and composter make of these questions?  A speculative fabulation by Kristina Lindstrom and Asa Stahl investigates.

Is there a politics of affect of repair? What are the analytic gains and dangers attached to the connections between maintenance and repair work and feminist-inspired theories of care? Reflecting on his work with long-term research programs in ecology and AIDS research, David Ribes asks if attending to repair as care may obscure important political questions around the setup and limits of maintenance work.

The constant, monotonic growth presumed by contemporary corporatism encourages fragile modes of operation and disposable end products. Products that last point towards futures that oppose the continual ballooning of economic incentive. The Centennial Light Bulb is a boundary object for epochs of care, a flashpoint that marks a historic change in the tensions between temporal resilience and economic gain.